Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday August 22, 2010 @06:38PM
from the mandatory-friend-list dept.

crimeandpunishment writes "North Korea has apparently decided this social networking thing is worth doing. Just days after launching Twitter and YouTube accounts, it appears to have added Facebook to the list. It probably won't get too many friends in South Korea, which has already blocked access to the North Korean Twitter account for containing 'illegal information' under its security laws...and says the Facebook page could suffer the same fate."

no different than most other face book users.. Except replace 'national identity' with 'personal identity' and 'governments hostile' with '3rd party organisation that has agendas other than making it easy for you to post pics of fluffy bunnies and Like This'

Huh, having North Korea and South Korea unite into one country sounds completely bizarre. I don't see how it could happen other than if South Korea invades North Korea or the North Korean government collapses. Is that what South Korea is really talking about when saying they want to "unite"?

"lets just put our national identity on servers owned by governments hostile to us"

It's not like they're uploading critical information (i.e. classified materials) to facebook. The worst the US could do is to deface the page. Of course if they were going to do that then they could have already set up a fake north Korean page and filled it with lies. Of course, there's no point in doing either of these things because there's nothing to be gained. It's not like the US needs to change the public view of North Korea.

Mr Kim, or as he prefers to be called "the dear leader", doesn't need Facebook to play games with farming or people's lives. He has control over millions of real people, all of whom can be forced to participate in whatever macabre social experiment he chooses to conduct, except that here in the real world there are no saves, no continues and you get only 1 life. The continued existence of the North Korean Worker's Party and the monstrous state that it has produced is one of the greatest ongoing travesties of social justice in our time. It is hard to imagine any other place on earth where the ordinary citizen is worse off than in North Korea. At least in Somalia and Sudan the people have some inkling of what the outside world is like and whether or not they are being lied to. The people of North Korea, on the other hand, have been so thoroughly brainwashed and controlled that the outside world essentially does not exist for them or at least not in any way that is meaningful. Even Cuba is practically a paradise by way of comparison to North Korea. Mr Kim and his father are disgraces to the entire human race, in the same league as Hitler and Stalin before them, and history will forever damn their names, just as surely as Hitler and Stalin are damned, when Korea is eventually re-united under a freely elected and democratic government of by and for the people of Korea. In the meantime the rest of the free world should do whatever it can to hasten that day.

And before people start yelling about "exceptions to freedom of speech", consider this. It is in fact legal to say "Barack Obama is a pedophile" in public, even though it's defamatory - I just did and there's nothing wrong with it. What's illegal is presenting it as fact. Same with "give me 2000 dollars or I'll shoot you". You can even say "fire" in a crowded theater, you just can't shout it at the top of your lungs. It's all about context and intent. Laws that make certain patterns of information illegal no matter what, however, most definitely are ridiculous and abhorrent.

Re-uniting Korea is going to be a nightmare. The South's infrastructure cannot handle the hordes of starving people form the North, and those people will never, ever be able to live productive lives in a free society - they simply don't know how.

Reunification will cause an immediate economic collapse like the world has seldom seen, followed by at least one generation of chaos as the brainwashed masses slowly die off from old age.

Is that South Korea is not the US, and doesn't have the same free speech laws. Not everyone subscribes to the same idea of freedom as the US. Some places have freedoms the US doesn't, some lack freedoms the US has.

Free countries don't mean unlimited freedom, and not all free countries are of the same mind on what freedoms people should have.

[North Korean] people will never, ever be able to live productive lives in a free society - they simply don't know how.

Most East Germans managed to adapt pretty well after the reunification, although North Korea is probably a bit worse than the GDR was. I don't think that Koreans are THAT much different from Germans. But yeah, it isn't going to be easy.

My wife is Korean, but born in Japan. Her grandparents traveled to Japan about 65 years ago. I don't have their whole story, but it isn't a good one. The US is at least partly responsible for dividing the two Korea's at the end of WWII, which eventually led to the Korean War. The Koreans in recent history have had a horrible time and most of it is the fault of foreign power (Japan, US/USSR/ etc). The progress South Korea has made since the end of combat operations (the war never ended) is amazing considering all of this.

At first, I thought the Best Korea joke was hilarious. But now, I think its really a tragedy.